Critical Care Reviews Newsletter

Welcome to the 493rd Critical Care Reviews Newsletter, bringing you the best critical care research and open access articles from across the medical literature over the past seven days.

The highlights of this week's edition are randomised controlled trials on left atrial appendage occlusion during cardiac surgery to prevent stroke & endovascular therapy for stroke due to basilar-artery occlusion; systematic reviews and meta analyses on tocilizumab in COVID-19 & corticosteroids in cardiac arrest; and observational studies on African COVID-19 critical care outcomes & biomarker guided ventilator liberation in acute hypoxemic respiratory failure.

There are also guidelines on fire safety and emergency evacuation for intensive care units and operating theatres & standards of monitoring during anaesthesia and recovery; narrative reviews on the evolution of cerebrovascular critical care & severe Guillain-Barré syndrome; editorials on the interplay between emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants and pandemic control & core outcome sets in intensive care; and commentaries on vascular mechanisms and manifestations of COVID-19, immunotherapy in COVID-19 & falsifiability in medicine.

If you only have time to read one review article this week, try this one on COVID-19 and earlier pandemics, sepsis, and vaccines.

Critical Care Reviews Podcast - the COAST Trial

I've been fortunate to chat with Prof Kathryn Maitland about the COAST trial on the Critical Care Reviews Podcast. COAST is a randomised controlled trial of oxygen therapy and high-flow nasal therapy in African children with pneumonia and was published recently in Intensive Care Medicine. It's a fascinating trial on oxygen therapy in respiratory failure and was run in the face of stiff opposition.